Let them eat bus transfers

Nelson, 30 and African-American, was convicted on the charge this week by six jurors who were not her peers: All were middle-class whites, and none had ever taken a bus in metro Atlanta. In other words, none had ever been in Nelson’s shoes:

They had never taken two buses to go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart with three kids in tow. They had never missed a transfer on the way home that caused them to wait a full hour-and-a-half with tired and hungry kids for the next bus. They had never been let off at a bus stop on a five-lane speedway, with their apartment in sight across the road, and been asked to drag those three little ones an additional half-mile-plus down the road to the nearest traffic signal and back in order to get home at last.

They apparently operate on the assumption that responsible people have cars and people who don’t have cars are irresponsible and reckless.

Why is this familiar?

Because we saw the same damn thing just before and during and after Hurricane Katrina. I remember it vividly – that Sunday afternoon, the day before Katrina hit, the news was full of warnings about the hurricane and officials saying urgently, “Everyone get in your cars immediately and get out of New Orleans”…with no mention of what people who didn’t have cars were supposed to do. I remember fuming and ranting about that on Sunday; fuming and ranting that nobody in charge even seemed to have formed the idea that some people actually don’t own cars and that perhaps they should not just be abandoned to drown. I ranted and fumed a lot more in the days that followed, as lots of people fumed and ranted about the reckless irresponsible fools who stayed in New Orleans, overlooking the fact that most of them had no way to get out.

What about the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land use regulators who allowed a bus stop to be placed so far from a signal and made no other provision for a safe crossing; who allowed – even encouraged, with wide, straight lanes – prevailing speeds of 50-plus on a road flanked by houses and apartments; who carved a fifth lane out of a wider median that could have provided more of a safe refuge for pedestrians; who designed the entire landscape to be hostile to people trying to get to work and groceries despite having no access to a car?

Based on my dim memories of a suburban-planning subsection of an undergraduate American poli-sci course, the lack of sidewalks and the danger to pedestrians is absolutely deliberate. A feature, not a bug. It originated in horrific 1950s tract “home” developments which were planned to be “self-contained” “communities” with their own post office, druggist, grocer, etc. But to get anywhere, you needed a car. Sidewalks were consistently left out (as were outlets onto any street that would connect to a thoroughfare; many of these meander like a snake into a dead end or cul de sac) to discourage foot traffic. Why? Because we don’t want to encourage undesirable elements—the car-lacking population, about whose demographics you’ll quickly guess—to see this as an acceptable place to walk.

I’ve begun to see this creeping into Vermont, which makes me furious. One of the nice things about this state is the livability of our small cities and towns; you can get where you need to go on foot or by bike most of the time (though I live just a hair to far from work to walk). But the newer developments—the inherently ugly crap-built McDwellings that all look the same—leave out sidewalks. Even small developments that are smack in the middle of towns (remember that our towns and cities are mostly 250 years and older). All of a sudden, the sidewalk just ends.

This and other urban “planning” techniques are absolute disasters for pedestrian and working class livability, not to mention the second-order effects on the environment because of increased private car use. And aesthetics, which has a whole hell of a lot to do with livability.

If you haven’t had a chance to look at the aerial picture of the highway and bus stop where Ms. Nelson and her kids got off, do. Notice the placement of the bus stop next to 8 lanes of highway with apartments and homes on the other side. It’s almost an active incitement to vehicular death for pedestrians.

This poor woman is a friend of a friend. If you’ve ever had the displeasure of visiting Cobb County Georgia, you’ll know that it’s an intellectual and moral wasteland. Citizens are required by law to own and maintain a firearm. The freethinkers there are constantly on the defensive to protect the public school system, including a semi-famous textbook sticker case in 2006. On the main street of Kennasaw, GA , near where this hit and run took place, there is a gigantic confederacy memerobilia store where you can buy your very own copy of “the white man’s bible”.

Our governor in Kansas just decided to close the state welfare office in our medium-sized city, as a cost-cutting measure, because there are other such facilities in bigger cities within reasonable driving distance on good, four-lane highways. Yes, really.

After three year long visits to the US and several shorter ones, I thought nothing could surprise me. I was wrong about that. What a totally fucked up country! (Though there are pockets of sanity, too, in which I spent much of my time.) I feel we are a bit saner over here. Today in Oslo, a hundred thousand people attended a rally in order to keep it that way. Sane.

Josh, if you haven’t read it already, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) describes with terrifying power the urban ‘renewal’ policies that fed into this sort of urban planning. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Disclosure: I am thoroughly middle-class, perhaps even upper middle-class (these distinctions mean something in Britain). I live in a very pleasant medieval city centre. I do not own a car. I do not even have a drivers’ licence. I own a bicycle.

Skepticlawyer-thank you for the recommendation. Sounds interesting, but I’ll have to wait for my Outrage Collection Bucket to dump and reset before I pick it up.

I too am “middle class,” though just over the edge of working class. I have a house and a car, but it wasn’t too many years ago that I was thoroughgoing poor. In my small neck of the woods, even people who can afford to be suburban jerks are trying not to be by agitating for better pedestrian/bike access and zoning more conducive to a walkable life (grocery stores you can reach on foot, etc.).

I must admit my first encounter with American ‘footpathless’ streets was something of an education. I felt I was being encouraged to walk through people’s flowerbeds, until I learnt that I wasn’t supposed to walk at all.

The only suburb I know personally that’s really like this description of Marietta is Amherst, New York, which is where the north campus of SUNY Buffalo is. It’s the weirdest, most dysfunctional campus I’ve ever laid eyes on (let alone tried to navigate). It looks like a university for cars. There are gigantic parking lots everywhere so all the buildings are miles apart. Also, it’s unbelievably ugly – a bastard child of Stalin and Bob Moses. A horrible, horrible place. (The south campus is in Buffalo, and it’s much less nightmarish.)

I am writing this while on a visit to friends in the pleasant open-planned city of Melbourne.

Every Australian city used to have an electric tramway network. My native city of Sydney was always the most congested, because it was the city of original British settlement and just grew like Topsy, with narrow streets appropriate for the bullock-wagon era. Melbourne began later and was well planned, with plenty of open leafy spaces and wide boulevardes.

In the 1950s a team of consultants was hired by the NSW state government to recommend on Sydney’s traffic problems. They came all the way from (you guessed it) Los Angeles.

As soon as it was announced they were coming Sir Robert Risson, the then chairman of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board, took action. He did not wait for their report: he knew already what that would recommend. Instead, he ordered work to begin immediately on setting all the tram lines of Melbourne into concrete.

When the then-trendy politicians of the Victorian government, under stimulus from the petroleum and automobile cartels, got around some years later to costing the removal of Melbourne’s trams, they were flummoxed.

As a result, Melbourne is today the only city in Australia to have its original tramway network still intact, and its tramways are arguably the best in the world. Sydney is permanently gridlocked, with a suburban railway system in constant crisis, and an inadequate diesel bus system. Desultory attempts are made from time to time to look into ways of re-introducing trams into Sydney, but the costs are always far too high.

I read somewhere that two tracks of railway are the people-moving equivalent of four tracks of trams, eight lanes of buses, and twenty-four lanes of cars.

I do not think that there is a bronze statue of Risson anywhere in Melbourne. But there should be, and right in the heart of the city.

One of the many joys of San Francisco is that it still has its old streetcar lines…the N Judah and the rest. That’s in addition to the 3 cable car lines and the ordinary buses. Seattle does not, blast its rotted fishy heart.

In 2003 I was in Frisco and rode on the famous cable cars. They are something else again, and the slopes they have to climb fully loaded are awesome.

The day I was there I saw a stretched limmo get stuck on the crest of one hill, grounded in the middle, just like a see-saw. Could go neither forward nor back. The driver just got out and scratched his head.

skepticlawyer @8: Not York, by any chance? DW and I were there the other week — marvelous place. We travelled all over England mostly by train, and got around London quite nicely by Tube or surface rail. Even got from Bayswater neighbourhood to Down House and back, all on public transit. Wonderful system.

@24 Thank you. I was about to say that. Kennesaw is the town that passed the gun law and supposedly they do now have the lowest crime rate and break-in rate of any satellite town of Atlanta. Statisticians continue to debate. But it’s not a county law, and in fact the trend among younger Cobb county cops is to be clueless regarding gun laws, search and seizure, property rights, identification requirements, or privacy rights. They also love harassing anyone even remotely brown looking and setting up “selective” DUI traps.

But not to go off topic into gun rights and cops, even with this tragic case, Cobb has limited and cut back on it’s already meager and horribly mismanaged transit system. It was already bad, but now? You simply can not live in many areas of the county if you don’t have a car. People will stare at you with suspicion if you’re walking down the street in some areas. God help you if you’re a young darker skinned male.

After being here for so long it’s obvious that this is a conscious strategy to keep the “undesirables” away and confined to “their areas”. Even fighting to get sidewalks is an ongoing chore. A friend just got a sidewalk in his fifty year old subdivision. The change in the neighborhood is astounding. People walking in the mornings, strolling calmly with their kids. Stopping to chat. He’s no longer afraid to get hit by cars that go 45 in a 25 zone, though the cars still go that fast. One sidewalk is all it took to get people out and into the neighborhood feeling like neighbors.

Ken Edelstein of Green Building Chronicle in Atlanta shows just how dangerous Austell Road isand just how far away the “crosswalk” is – it’s not a crosswalk at all, it’s an intersection with traffic lights, and it’s two bus stops away. Nobody gets to the apartment complex that way.

Cobb County transit stuck up an insulting sign in the bus shelter saying be careful, use a crosswalk. But there is no god damn crosswalk. As Edelstein says, the bus stop is there, it’s obviously there for the apartment complex; it’s idiotic to say “don’t cross here.”

The whole thing is just so insulting and callous and brutal it’s making me grind my little teeth to powder.